As a photographer for the San Francisco Express Times, an underground weekly newspaper, in the 1960s, Nacio Jan Brown would sit in Caffe Mediterraneum on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and wait for a riot to arrive.

On his way out the door one day, he saw a girl sitting on a chair eating a hardboiled egg, and snapped her portrait, mid-bite, salt shaker at hand. When he saw the contact sheet, he forgot all about protests and the underground press.

"I thought, 'I'm going to do a book on the street scene on one block of Telegraph Avenue, just based upon having taken this one picture,' " Brown recalls.

Forty years later, he finds himself back among the teenagers and lefties he spent four years with, remembering their nicknames and their stories, many of which ended badly, as he walks through the gallery at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

His long-forgotten images are on display in new prints because the originals are now valued at $2,500 apiece. A New York gallery exhibition is coming after the one in Berkeley closes in January, and all of this comes as a surprise to Brown, who gave up photography to build hot tubs in 1975.

He completed the book he set out do, "Rag Theater: The 2400 Block of Telegraph Avenue 1969-1973," and a copy was left behind in an estate sale, where a gallery owner bought it. He found Brown at his desk waiting for the phone to ring, a function of his latest career, which is selling houses for Pacific Union in Berkeley.

The title looks as if it came from the posture of his subjects. But Rag Theatre, spelled differently, was a clothing store that drew its own crowd to the block. "Bell bottoms, the whole deal," he says, "early '70s embarrassing clothes."

Some of the subjects look decked out like Rag Theatre models, and they are all, regardless of age, amazingly trusting of Brown.

"They were here before school, after school and, in some cases, instead of school," says Brown, who was here instead of school himself, having dropped out of Cal not long after he arrived from St. Ignatius (class of 1960) in San Francisco.

It helped that he was still in his 20s and had long, wavy hair. "I tried wearing beads once and felt stupid," he says. It helped more that he was the first photographer to get there with the Leica he'd bought after selling a four-page spread on People's Park to Paris Match.

"All these people came to my block," he says, "which was the block Moe's Books is on, Cody's Books was on and, most significantly, the Med." Easy to spot with its striped awning, the Med, as Caffe Mediterraneum is called, is where Dustin Hoffman is sitting when he sees Katharine Ross on a bus and gives chase down Telegraph in "The Graduate."

Brown had his own table and his own form of chase. "I spent way too many years of my life in the Med, venturing out to photograph," he says.

When he started the project, kids ran loose and so did the dogs. "There was this sort of exuberant innocence in '69 that was completely gone by '72 or '73," he says, standing before a detail image of needle tracks on a forearm. "This energetic life got overshadowed by the drug scene."

Brown, 69, still lives in Berkeley, but he hasn't been to the Med in years. He no longer carries the Leica, but he has a film camera in his shirt pocket, always on the lockout for something, maybe one of his subjects from Telegraph Avenue.

"A lot of these kids didn't make it out of the '70s," he says, studying one print. "At least one of these boys is dead. But the people that did make it out look back at this as the greatest part of their lives. They are just thrilled to be part of this scene. It's this golden shimmering moment from their youths."